Check out this news story about consensual fights taped purposely to put on the web.
What I find interesting is that I did this 7 years ago when I was in highschool. We were aware of a fight, my friend borrowed a video camera from school and he taped it. Using video editing equipment I had at home I put it onto my computer and made a crappy website for people to download the video and post comments. A few days later over 800 students has visited the site and the principal found out about it. He brought me in for questioning, got the police involved, and wanted to know where the disk was. He searched my locker and everything. There was no disk, I recorded it from cassette to the computer. Then I uploaded it to the webserver where my website was hosted at the time (in California).
He thought this was a big plot to make him and the school look bad. He had worked for 5 years to clean up the school and fights (the school was known for violence before) and I had made a video and put it on the internet so that the community would think bad things about the school and not purchase yearbook ads! He couldn't have been farther from the truth. I plainly thought it was neat. I was expelled from the school, but without a written letter. My boss' brother is a lawyer and he got involved. My principal couldn't believe it. My dad made me go back to school and notify the front desk before class because I did not have a written letter telling me not to be there. They wrote me one. A few letters were exchanged between my lawyer and the school. After 2 weeks they let me back in class, and at the end of the year they destroyed the files from my student records.
The people who were in the fight were suspended for 3 days.
Working from his home office in Toronto,
Ryan de Laplante can be found developing software in
Java by day, and obsessing with technology by night.
Ryan has been designing and writing software for
IJW since 1998 and is very passionate about his work.
